Posts Tagged ‘Pedagogy’

“The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.” Walden and Resistance to Civil Government Henry D. Thoreau, edited by William Rossi 1992 pg. 47

“In this case, that constraint had taken the form of the command Jacotot had given. And it resulted in an important consequence, no longer for the student but for the master. The students had learned without a master explicator, but not, for all that, without a master. They didn’t know how before, and now they knew how. Therefore, Jacotot had taught them something. And yet he had communicated nothing to them of his science. So it wasn’t the master’s science that the student learned. His mastery lay in the command that had enclosed the students in a closed circle from which they alone could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book. Thus, the two functions that link the practice of the master explicator, that of the savant and that of the master had been dissociated. The two faculties in play during the act of learning, namely intelligence and will, had therefore also been separated, liberated from each other. A pure relationship of will to will had been established between master and student: a relationship wherein the master’s domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and that of the book –the intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between master and student. This device allowed the jumbled categories of the pedagogical act to be sorted out, and explicative stultification to be precisely defined. There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. A person –and a child in particular –may need a master when his own will is not strong enough to set him on track and keep him there. But that subjection is purely one of will over will. It becomes stultification when it links an intelligence to another intelligence. In the act of teaching and learning there are two wills and two intelligences. We will call their coincidence stultification. In the experimental situation Jacotot created, the student was linked to a will, Jacotot’s, and to an intelligence, the book’s –the two entirely distinct. We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations –the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will –emancipation.” The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Jacques Ranciere 1991 pg. 12-13

“We’ve been home schooling for a year and a half now, and, believe me, I’m no expert. I do not have a handle on all the methods, philosophies and curriculum choices out there, but what I have discovered is that I need to know why we are home schooling… I present to you five important reasons the Sagar family is home schooling…

Reason No. 2: Home schooling allows our children to develop a worldview based on truth…. Education, worldview and character are wrapped up together. The Bible says to teach your children “when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 11:19).

Reason No. 3: Home schooling gives us as parents greater control over what our kids learn, and when.” We Wouldn’t Trade Home Schooling For Anything Rebekah Sagar Guest Columnist Editorial Newark Advocate March 4, 2012